In some ways, Ratramnus is like Augustine: both Roman Catholics and Protestants claim him as their own. In reality, his book stands in church history more as a question mark than a period. It has contributed to raise important inquiries, and has proven that the history of Christian thought is not as black and white as we often depict it.

Little is known about Ratramnus. He was a Benedictine monk at Corbie Abbey, in Picardy, France, who had gained an excellent reputation as scholar and writer. Besides his work on the Lord’s Supper (On the Body and Blood of the Lord), he wrote several books, including a popular treatise in four books in defense of the “Filioque Clause” (as added to the Nicene Creed). He also defended the monk Gottschalk and his controversial views on double predestination.

The Reason for the Book

It was Charles the Bald, King of West Francia, who asked Ratramnus to write on the Lord’s Supper. Ratramnus’s teacher, Paschasius Radbertus, had recently written a similar book by the same title, but Charles wanted to reach a better understanding and was interested in hearing Ratramnus’s opinion, which he greatly valued.

Specifically, Charles wanted to know “whether that which in the church is received into the mouth of the faithful becomes the body and the blood of Christ in a mystery or in truth.”[1] According to Ratramnus, the church was already “divided by great schism”[2] in this matter.

Ratramnus’s work stood in opposition to Radbertus’s. For Radbertus, at the moment of consecration, the eucharistic bread and wine become identical with the body and blood of Christ. According to 16^th-century Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, Radbertus’s book represented the first written declaration of the reality of the Body and Blood of Christ in the Eucharist, which became official Roman Catholic doctrine in 1215.

Ratramnus, instead, described the elements as a figurative representation to be partaken by faith in remembrance of Christ. There is no record of any controversy between the two monks, not even when, later that year, Radbertus became Corbie’s abbot.

Ratramnus is the clearest of the two, and demonstrates a greater familiarity with the church fathers, particularly Augustine. Radbertus’s work is shorter and simpler, employing stories of eucharistic miracles in the lives of saints.

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